A card cage, which is also known as a sub rack, is used to house circuit cards that perform various actions in a communications network. The circuit cards, which are also known as processor modules, boards, circuit boards, printed circuit boards, and plug-in units, contain electronic components (e.g. integrated circuits, resistors, capacitors, etc.) that aid in the processing of a requested action. The card receives a request to process the requested action and, after processing the requested action, sends the results to the communication entity that originated the request. The entity originating the request can be a device exterior to the card cage (e.g. a telephone, a computer, a communications switch, a card in another card cage, etc.) or may be a device in the card cage (e.g. a card or any device such as a processor on a card, etc.).
A typical card cage provides a connection and power to a card via the back-plane of the card cage. Referring to FIG. 1, a prior art card cage system 10, that includes a card cage 12 and a plurality of cards 16, is displayed. When one or more of the cards 16 are placed in the card cage 12, a back portion of the cards 16 referred to as connector 18, is electrically coupled to a portion of the back-plane 14 that is capable of receiving connector 18. This coupling allows for the transfer of signals to and from the card corresponding to the requested action. If the back plane 14 becomes inactive (e.g. by going out of service, when a component on the back plane becomes corrupt, etc.), however, the cards 16 will no longer be able to receive power and thus will be unable to perform their intended functionality. This problem is compounded when many cards are concurrently being utilized or when the cards being utilized perform various functions. In such a situation, services may become unavailable, isolated outages may occur and an entire communications network may be crippled.
To overcome this serious situation in prior art card cages, the back plane 14 must be powered off and then removed. Once a prognosis is made as to the reasons(s) for failure, the back plane 14 is either repaired or replaced and then placed back into the card cage 12. As a result, considerable down time is typically encountered causing an adverse effect on the efficiency and quality of the communications network. Thus, there exists a need for a card cage, card and method of information transfer that overcomes the problems described above.